TRIGGERnometry - Civil War in America? - Tim Pool
Episode Date: May 4, 2025Tim Pool is an American political commentator, podcaster, and YouTuber. SPONSOR. Let our sponsor, American Financing, help you regain control of your finances. Go to https://americanfinancing.net/t...riggernometry or call 866-I 886-5350. NMLS 182334, http://nmlsconsumeraccess.org/ SPONSOR. Go to https://shipstation.com and use code TRIGGER to sign up for your FREE trial. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: marketing@triggerpod.co.uk Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 00:57 CIVIL WAR 16:03 Swatting 19:17 Is The Latent Anger In America Increasing? 28:09 Is The Left A Cult? 43:34 Most Mentally Ill People Are Liberal 56:47 What Does Free Speech Mean? 01:16:00 "We Are At A Time Of War" Debate 01:50:35 What's The Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
What do you make of where we are at the moment?
What's your take?
Do I have to say it?
Civil war!
We're tracking over the past several years
that we are in a period of civil strife.
Civil strife is defined academically as 70 or more political deaths per year.
We have 30 in the first few months.
In times of war, a wartime president makes difficult decisions,
which are outside what our principles purport to be.
But we're not in the time of war.
And it's also as well, Tim.
No, we're not.
What I'm saying is,
You're extending the definition of war, wartime, and emergency in order to suit your agenda, is what it sounds like.
You are incorrect.
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Tim Poole, welcome to Trigonometry.
Thanks for having me. It's an honor and a privilege.
It's great to have you on, man. It's an interesting time with a lot going on.
You know, people are burning Tesla's down, all kinds of crazy shit is going on.
What do you make of where we are at the moment? What's your take?
Do I have to say it?
I mean, that's the point of the show. Civil War.
Oh, you love that shit. This is one other things on.
I don't love it. I just think I'm reading and paying attention and studying.
And I don't even go as far as, are you familiar with Rudyard Lynch?
No.
He's got a big YouTube channel.
what if alt history.
It's a very smart guy.
He seems a little bit autistic.
I think he said that.
And he predicted 1,000 people would be dead
from the point of the election
to the beginning of April.
And we had him on my show
and I said, that's not going to happen.
I think we're at like 30.
30 deaths politically motivated
since the election.
And there's wild stories
like a guy killed his family
and he was screaming about Trump
or something like that.
He's not a thousand people.
He's done a bunch of analysis.
He's done many videos
breaking down various civil wars, periods of tumult.
It's not that he's hyper-focused on conflict.
It's that what we are seeing in the United States
tracks alongside in very similar ways
what happened to a lot of other countries,
pre-revolution, pre-civil war,
or even international conflict.
What do you mean by that?
What do you see?
What are the markers that make you think
that that's the path that America's on?
So when it comes to me saying civil war,
and I do so quite a bit,
I don't do so the most,
but I have a high-profile show,
so people tend to equate it to me.
My analysis is actually just I read news stories and then I agree or disagree.
So eight years ago, there was an article in the Atlantic that asked a bunch of national security experts and, you know, intelligence individuals, what the likelihood of a civil war in the United States would be.
And the consensus, I think, was 30% in the next 10 years.
But some individuals said over 90.
So the view among academics is the precursor of civil war, a period is known as a civil war.
a period is known as a civil strife period. Civil strife doesn't always lead to civil war.
The American civil rights move in 1950s was a period of civil strife, not civil unrest.
Civil strife is defined academically as 70 or more political deaths per year. We have 30 in the
first few months. Depending on how you want to define it, you could argue a little bit more, a little
bit less. We're tracking over the past several years that we are in a period of civil strife.
I counter that with we have a denser population. Denser population means a higher hard number,
but less per capita, so I don't know if that will be perfect.
But a few things to consider.
Back when Trump got elected, we were dealing with a bifurcation in America culture starting
probably at the end of the 2000s with the emergence of new media.
It was apparent to people who were born on the Internet, who grew up on the Internet,
and the people who lived in the mainstream corporate press world.
I had been saying since back then, we are seeing a divergent reality.
Scott Adams articulated much better than I with one screen, two films.
So now the markers are obviously political violence of the street, advocacy for extreme violence and terror in the press among a prominent faction, and administrative civil wars, Eric Weinstein called it.
All of these things have basically shown that the dam that is holding back the floods of conflict are on the verge of exploding.
So if we go back to Donald Trump's first term, you had the street-level violence of Antifa.
If any conservative or pro-Trump group tried organizing, they were brutalized in the street.
There was no inverse of this until the emergence of the proud boys.
Famously in Berkeley, a free speech rally was held advocating for the right to speak up in public.
What happened? Far leftists, many aligned with Antifa as their banner or whatever showed up through explosives.
I mean, this is 2017 or 18.
They're throwing explosives at elderly women.
I was there.
There is an 60-70-year-old woman waving a little flag, and I got the video on my YouTube channel.
someone threw an M-80 at her and explodes and she falls over and the crowd screaming.
One guy came with a bike lock and he bashed several people over the head with it.
These were not conservatives doing this.
That level of street violence ends up with Donald Trump.
He's accused of being a Russian spy, literally, targeted by elements of our own intelligence agencies.
So you have prominent media personalities defending the violence in the streets.
You have violence in the streets and you have the administrative state targeting the, the
president at the time. Those things were all still very much on the lighter end, but bubbling up.
So at the time, we saw several articles. There was a Princeton professor. There's a CIA analyst.
There's Stephen Marsh, who's a journalist and researcher, more of a liberal persuasion.
And you had this article in the Atlantic and a bunch of ancillary articles that emerged outside of it asking the question of, is this how civil war starts?
Nobody wants to believe it. Nobody wants to pay attention. And so at the time, I had been saying to people, guys, do you think there's any
veracity to this. I was part of a chat group with a bunch of different journalists in D.C.
And they all mocked the idea and said, don't be stupid. People fighting the street all the time.
There's protests all the time. And I said, yes, but it's the presidency. They were accusing the
president of being a spy for a foreign government, effectively a traitor. That's the penalty of which is death.
Like, this is a crazy thing to attack a president with. And most people poo-pooed the idea.
think about how far we've gone since
2017, 2018 to where we are now.
So a few examples.
The first thing I want to say is
the American Civil War started with the Battle of Fort Sumter
in South Carolina.
Several states, seven, seceded from the union
before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president.
And won the election.
Seven states, slave states said,
this man is going to abolish slavery,
which will damage our economy,
and we have a right to own slaves, blah, blah, blah.
So we are seceding now.
Abraham Lincoln didn't obviously want the union to break apart.
So they tried to maintain federal military bases in southern territory, notably in South Carolina.
There's Fort Sumter.
The union occupied it.
South Carolina said, we are no longer part of your union.
Take your troops and go.
The North said, no, we won't do that.
So the South shows up with a bunch of ships.
It's considered the first battle of the Civil War despite the fact that no one killed each other.
One guy died.
It was an accident.
Historically, we say, civil war began on that day.
However, at the time, nobody thought a civil war it started.
So when the first battle of Manassas occurred, which is actually just a, you know,
dozen or so miles from where we're sitting today, thanks for docksings.
Oh, I mean, I don't know.
You're in Washington, D.C.
It's a joke.
It's a joke.
You had Confederate forces amassing on the south, and then you had Union forces amassing on the north,
and people picnicked.
They showed up to enjoy the show with a nice picnic and laugh.
laugh about how there's no civil war
it can't happen. And then it was a massacre.
And the historical
depiction of what occurred as people are running around
freaking out, civilians are getting their heads blown off
because people were standing on a hillside
as the war was erupting in full swing.
Interestingly, the Confederacy won the Battle of Bull Run.
And if they had marched on D.C., the war would have been over
and the Confederacy would have won. But this is a really good example
because anybody listening right now
can go and read, Fort Sumter started the Civil War,
And then no one believed it.
So the question is, are we in it now and we just don't believe it?
I can't believe that after all of this time with the escalation of administrative conflict,
two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, an attempt by one political faction to put him in prison, impeach him,
and the fact that in multiple jurisdictions, they have criminally charged Trump's lawyers,
which is so far beyond what the Constitution allows.
And they argue they're justified in doing so, but it's ludicrous.
No one on the right has exercised power to that degree in any way.
Trump's not invoked the Insurrection Act in his first term to stop the riots.
Trump didn't order federal authorities to go round up these far-lift extremists.
Trump didn't order U.S. attorneys during his first term to start arresting lawyers and journalists or anything like this.
When Trump gets out of office, they continue to pursue him, accuse him of insurrection, lie about happen on January 6th,
and then started criminally charging his lawyers, notably Jenna Ellis, I'm not a big fan of.
She cried on camera saying, I'm so sorry for working with Donald Trump.
She's just a lawyer.
What was she accused of?
She drafted letters for the president, which is a legally constitutionally protected service.
You can't criminally charge lawyers?
Everyone's entitled to have a lawyer.
They did in Georgia.
And they tried to put her in prison for decades under RICO charges,
claiming that because she represented Trump, she was involved in a criminal conspiracy.
So when you get to that level of we will burn you to the ground, if you, like, we're going to
take your lawyers away from you.
We're going to put your legal team, your supporters, Giuliani, Manafort.
I mean, this has been going on for nearly a decade.
So the period before the American Civil War is called Bleeding Kansas, seven years of bloody
conflict in the territory of Kansas as people fought over whether it would be a slave state or
a free state.
There was administrative conflict in the, in the non-waring territories.
it wasn't a civil war, but people have been talking about it for a long time. You end up getting
the famous caning in Congress where I believe it was a southerner, caned, a northerner. I think it was
a, yeah, Northern Republican was beaten and got a TBI. It's nuts. So that violence had existed.
Today, we have, we've evolved from the far left shows up and beats the crap out of right-wingers
to the far-left rampages around the country in mass riding.
I'm, how do you say this? May 29th, 2020, far left for extremists to the tune of about
1,000, showed up in front of the White House throwing fire bombs.
They firebombed the White House grounds.
They firebombed St. John's Church.
They injured over 100 law enforcement officers, ripped the barricades down.
And then Trump and Bill Barr sent in police to break it up.
Had they not done that, far leftists would have stormed the White House.
But Trump said, we're not going to let him do it.
The next day, they insulted Trump in the media.
They called him Bunker Boy because he was first.
forced to flee to an emergency bunker. Now I'd just like to play this game. Every step of the way
we've had this conversation on is the United States moving towards civil war. I don't know that it is.
I'm just some guy who reads the news. I've asked people this question. If we went back,
insert any number of years, and told someone what we are seeing today would happen, would they believe
you? The answer is no. If I went back to 2016 and said four years from now, we will see the
worst riots in this country in 50 years with 30 plus deaths, a thousand plus people in D.C.
will firebomb the White House and St. John's Church across the street forcing the president
to flee to an underground bunker with a security personnel. They would have laughed in my face.
And I know this because they did in 2018 when the stories were bubbling up. The response I got
from the journalist in D.C., not that I was saying, it's civil war is coming. Oh, my God. I said,
do you guys think these articles are legit? There's a Princeton professor saying it's coming.
they'd say, it'll never happen. It's impossible. The security state wouldn't allow it.
Ryan Long, comedian, comes on my show in 2020. And we talked about some of the latest updates and what was going on. I mean, we had the summer of love riots. And we discussed civil war. He comes on my show a year later. And I view this as a gotcha. Though Ryan's a friend, he's a, you know, we think he's great. He's, so we're hanging out before the show. He's talking to me and everything's fine. And then right when the show starts, he pulls a gotcha where he goes.
where's a civil war, Tim?
Last time I was here you told me there was going to be a civil war,
and I left kind of freaking out.
And I went, on January 6th, 2021, 1,000 Donald Trump supporters
stormed the capital of the United States,
smashing windows and climbing to the building,
disrupting the electoral vote count.
Many other people on the other side of the building
walked in as the doors were opened.
They called that an insurrection.
And he went, well, I'm like, right,
the left right now is arguing that Donald Trump
tried to overthrow this country with a violent,
with a violent coup of his supporters
that he called for.
Now, I certainly believe that it was largely just a riot at a government building, which was extremely bad.
There was no real functional plan that Trump or anybody had to remove the government.
Yeah, it wasn't an attempt to seize power.
But you don't, well, silly, I think is probably understating the case.
It was not a good thing to happen.
I'm saying the argument that Trump organized a military takeover with no weapons is silly.
That idea is silly.
It was not a good thing to happen, as you said.
It was one of the darkest days of this country in modern history.
And I've routinely called for those that ride
to go to prison. I just think that four years in prison for a ride,
it's probably good enough, and now we can bring some of these people home.
Tim, you've outlined your case, and it's very persuasive.
I would argue that you're missing a crucial and fundamental part,
which is COVID. COVID essentially locking people down,
putting them in their houses for X amount of months,
watching their businesses go to the wall,
become incredibly frustrated and angry, deservedly so.
Spend all day, every day,
mainlining social media into your eyeballs
is enough to send anyone a little bit loopy,
me and all of us here included.
And I think what ends up happening with COVID is
more people plugged in to the political entertainment element.
Yes.
You're locked in your house and what happens?
We saw podcast numbers through the roof.
I mean, it was nuts.
my channels were getting a combined 150 million views per month.
Arguably one of the biggest, it's not a single show.
It was like a series of clips on YouTube plus two podcasts.
So what happens is people with nothing to do, they turn to YouTube, they turn to social media.
Their life is being destroyed specifically by a political environment.
So a large portion turned to a political entertainment.
Those people have maintained that.
COVID exacerbated the problem.
It enraged people and it activated people.
So people who normally wouldn't pay attention, all of a sudden now were wired into politics.
This is why Donald Trump did not win in 2020.
So I told Steve Bannon in this, a friend of mine, I've known since I was a kid, couldn't tell you what Supreme Court justice meant.
He would think it's some kind of term for accountability.
He wouldn't realize you're talking about people.
He filmed himself carrying a mail-in ballot with his phone, filming it as he walked to the mailbox and said, I'm doing my part, are you?
and he put his mail in ballot in.
And as soon as I saw that, I said Trump lost.
I was telling my friends, I was like, yo, when you get homie,
who doesn't know left from right in politics or up from down,
and he's filming himself doing this?
I was like, I don't know, Trump wins.
And the problems of COVID were largely viewed as Trump's fault
because most people don't pay attention to the nuance of what was going on.
And look, let's be real, Trump was president.
What I see now when people say, it's remarkable.
It's conversation with someone recently, they said,
it's not going to happen. There's not going to be a civil war. And I'm like, my dude,
have you not seen enough over the past eight years to consider perhaps reading about the Spanish
Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the American Civil War? And to consider, maybe you're right,
it won't happen, but there's a strong probability. I'm not saying more than 50% that it can.
For instance, today we're not dealing with with wanton violence through the streets. We're dealing
with around 20 direct swattings targeting individuals. This is now an effort of largely leftist
individuals now terrorizing the right intentionally, where in 2020 it was anger and street
violence and firebys. Just for people who are not clued in the swatting is when someone calls
up the police and says there's an emergency happening at this house. The SWAT team arrives,
kicks down the door potentially, et cetera. And it's an attempt, A, to make that person potentially
get killed by the SWAT team, or to make them feel very unsafe and probably both, or to create
situation, as you explained before,
we started, which whereby
the police stopped coming
and then that person is actually
unsafe because they have... Exactly. So a lot
of people need to understand, we get swatted
all the time, nonstop.
Famously, we had this one year where we got swatted
15 times and we were tracking them because
there were minor disruptions.
The first one
disrupted the show. We had to get up and leave.
After that,
we conferred with security and usually
it was fine. There was one credible
bomb threat. We had the bomb squad come out twice. I'm not going to explain the tactics they use
to force us to happen, but it's relatively easy for these people who know how to do it. We still get
swatted, but we've mitigated it. So now we don't just, there's no reason to talk about. It doesn't
affect us anymore. One of the reasons they do it is also to strain resources. So when Owen Schroier of
Info Wars is forced to walk out of his house backwards, they wake him at the middle of night. He's
tired. It's harder for him to work. They have to spend money on
security, they have to now allocate a portion of their time. You do that to enough people,
you can create friction for your political opponents. So it causes economic damage, it causes chaos.
It's a, in terms of warfare, swatting is a masterfully powerful tactic.
It's demoralization, effectively.
But it also shows chaos in the community, and it makes it easier for the far left to engage in street violence.
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Well, I wanted to take your argument through.
I think you're making some really interesting points.
And people can agree or disagree or whatever,
but I just want to explore your argument.
And the one thing that as you're talking,
I'm definitely, it's actually,
Franz and I were walking around yesterday.
And the one thing that we notice,
and we come to the U.S. regularly,
but we don't live here.
And that can be an interesting perspective
because you're coming a couple of times a year,
you're seeing how things are evolving,
you've got an eye-side-of-perspective.
The one thing I said to him yesterday was walking around
is there is a hell of a lot of latent anger in America.
Like, you just observe a normal interaction between people
where someone cuts someone up in traffic
or a cyclist and a guy driving a car get into...
And it's always like, fuck you, buddy!
like that, like that.
But I assumed that is just like,
this is how American culture is versus the Brits,
we're more polite, we'll call you a dickhead behind your back.
And then we'll get the knife out.
And then we'll get the knife back.
Right.
And we'll report you to the police for your tweets.
Like that's our approach.
And I just assumed that you guys, you know, frontier culture,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or do you feel that that latent anger is getting more intense?
It's way more intense.
We, I intentionally drove my cyber truck here.
You know, maybe I shouldn't say intentionally, but like, it's my cyber truck.
I'm not going to not take, I got, I have three Teslas.
And so I said, I take the truck.
I have my crew with me.
They're my friends, but it's also, you know, for security reasons.
And we didn't, we didn't hire armed guards this time.
But we, we, we, we, we, I was considering bringing one of our guys who's a lot of
legally carrying in D.C.
On the way here, it looked like a Lee was trying to run us off the road.
I, I say that lightly because.
sometimes people are bad drivers.
But there was a woman who got within inches of the car
and held the position while staring at us the whole time.
And we're just looking like, what do we do?
Do we like, this is crazy.
My buddy was freaking out.
He was like, dude, she's staring us down
and she, like, got on the line next to the truck within inches.
And I was like, maybe we should get over.
And then she held that.
Maybe sometimes people are bad drivers.
Maybe, maybe, you know.
All right.
Well, let's just agree that we agree.
that there's a lot of latent anger.
Well, I'll add one thing.
Yeah.
As we were parking, people are staring at us and one guy spit at us.
Some woman was shaking her head at us.
Some guy spit at us.
Like, he looked at us and he looked at us.
A woman pointed at us.
He looked and he spit at us.
You are a very well-known person in America who a lot of people don't like.
They can't see me in the car.
Okay.
And we are in a very particular moment with the whole Tesla thing, right?
But I guess what I was curious about is, like, we had Charlemagne,
on the show earlier, we talked to Andrew Shorts
as well, and they both made an interesting point,
I thought, and this comes back to
the fact that you used to cover, you know, your career
from what I understand, really started by covering
the Occupy Wall Street movie.
You're right, started in a big way.
And what they were
saying is, I think most people
underestimate the impact of income
and wealth inequality in this country on the way people
feel in that shit
is getting really expensive,
life is getting a lot harder,
the American dream is becoming
much more of a dream than a reality
for many, many, many people.
You know, I think, I remember
I was talking to Chris Williamson about this,
and he made the point that the average American
has, like, less than $800 in savings,
they're constantly on the verge of bankruptcy,
one health issue that they're going to be screwed.
That anger that you're talking about,
do you think it comes from that reality
or do you think there's something else going on?
I would say it technically does.
It's the perception of the wealth inequality.
It's the perception of the American dream.
The American dream still exists. It always has. The American dream was never that you were going to get a four-year degree and then make hundreds of thousands of dollars and go on vacation. The American dream was that you could move here from the Philippines, live in a one-bedroom apartment with your three kids and wife sharing literally just the one room. You would work 16-hour shifts every single day, but your children would advance upward in class. Whereas the home country you came from, you couldn't do that. It was a country where a kid from the inner-scentry.
city with not even two nickels to rub together, could look the president in the eye and say,
go fuck yourself, Mr. President, and nothing could be done about it. The American dream very much is
still there, but the perception of it is going away, largely because of our cultural failings.
This all ties back to the emergence of social media, the exploitation of algorithms, and the
perception that was created among the younger generation that America sucks, when in fact it doesn't.
These people have never been other countries. They don't understand what it's like. And so they live in this
country where they perceive everything through the lens of a largely leftist hatred algorithm,
which was intended to make money, and now they think everything's bad. They think it's getting
worse. They blame the wealthy for their problems. They don't realize these class mobility and
opportunity doesn't exist in other countries. That being said, it's not made better by our economic
crises with the, you know, food shortages, egg prices, gas prices. That certainly plays a large
raw. Property prices as well.
Well, this is what I'm going to say. I'm not an
American, so I'm just exploring the argument.
You push back on this, but I would imagine
a part of the American dream is not just that
your kids would do better, which, by the way, they're
probably not going to, both
in this country and in our country, right?
That sense of the next
generation, like only 30% of
Americans, according to the latest poll, think that their children
would do better. But a Filipino family's children?
So here's what I'm saying, right? But you,
I think there is also a
real material dimension to it, which is
It's not just about your kids doing better.
There are certain markers that people would think
a signifies of them doing better, which is they own their own house, right?
Which means that they can pass wealth down to the next generation.
And they have the opportunity, basically, to have kids, right?
That is unavailable to a lot of people for people with financial reasons.
I disagree.
Okay, tell me more.
The people who made this country, the founders of this country,
the conquerors of this continent, got on boats where I believe
around 20% of the people on those boats died.
When they landed, they arrived on barren shores.
They knew they were sailing to barren shores.
And after that, a majority of them died.
And those who survived the winter, either through sheer grit, luck, or the assistance of Native
Americans in some instances, were able to then have children, and a lot of that grit was
passed down.
This is why I see the difference between the European perspective on hate speech and things
like this versus the United States. Gun rights, for instance, that harsh journey, it killed the
week. Or I don't even think the people were weak who did it. They were all very strong people
to make that decision. Today, you have people who are like, I need a big, if I don't have a TV,
two weeks vacation, then I'm not doing well. They're not getting me wrong. Owning a house is important.
But back then, you'd walk into the woods and you didn't have a house. And to have one, you had to put
sticks and leaves together. That was a dream come true for these people. Now, I understand we want
things to be better, and people expect a certain degree of comfort. But I think an important
perspective people should have is where we came from and what was considered to be prosperity
and luxury involved extreme high rates of death, sacrifice, and difficulty that no one experiences
today. Even poor people have access to clean drinking water, unheard of. If you're a homeless
man in this country, you likely are obese. This is a fact in the United States, our homeless are
likely to be obese. I mean, there is an incongruence in the function of what our society should be
doing. People do want to own homes, have families. But if you take a look at them in the poorest areas,
it's the poorer people who are having more kids. So I would say, largely among those who
purport to be angry at our government and our structure, they don't even want to have kids.
They're advocating in immediate not to have kids. They're angry at structures and systems based off
of a perception built by an algorithmic media machine that was simply trying to make them angry to
make money. Now they live in a world of fear and hatred, pure hatred. And you ask them, why do you
hate Tesla's so much? Two years ago, you told us we had to own one. Now you're firebombing them and
cheering for it on TV. There's no logic behind what they're angry about. This is why I refer to the
left largely as a cult. You have the people who are scared to defy it because they live in these
areas and they know someone will shoot at them or smash their cars or their windows.
So they put stickers on their cars.
They put signs in their windows.
Please don't hurt me.
And then you have people who just, without thought,
will hate what they're told to hate
and not be able to explain to you why.
But you say the left is a cult.
It's not the whole of the left.
Let's be fair to it.
That is a very small percentage of people.
I can do the same thing with the right.
And I can say, look, the right,
they're completely insane.
Look at these nutbags on Twitter.
You'd be wrong.
Really?
Yeah.
RFK Jr., former liberal, Tulsi Gabbard, former liberal, Donald Trump, former liberal, Elon Musk, former liberal,
Colin Wright, former liberal, Tim Poole, former liberal.
How is it that the popular vote winner, Donald Trump, was a Democrat up until his first term,
that Tulsi Gabbard, DNI, former Democrat that I supported in 2020.
I never voted Republican. I didn't like Republicans.
And now the Republican Maga Movement, not the neocons, is an eclectic bunch of diverse views
which debate each other.
How is it that Charlie Kirk, Christian Conservative, with one of the largest conservative platforms, invites moderate pro-choice Tim Poole onto his stage for his biggest event of the year to discuss those views to the public.
On the left, what do you think would happen if you went and opposed their views at a public forum?
You'd be threatened with violence.
And I'm not saying literally everyone all the time, but booking liberals to come on my show or any other show, people in this.
They have the same problem.
Yeah.
They refuse to do it.
They don't want to talk.
Back in, I think it was 2018.
But, but George, we should say why as well.
They're scared of their own side.
It's a cult.
So I can sit in front of a libertarian like Dave Smith, who is going to rant about how Israel is bad, and Charlie Kirk at the same time, and we leave with beers in our hands, smiles on our faces.
And Dave will say, Charlie, I really do appreciate it.
I think you do good work.
I know we disagree.
The left doesn't do that.
They firebomb your buildings.
Or they just don't show up.
Or they try to get you fired.
They swat you.
They harass you.
The reason I say it's a cult is because you could not define what they believe.
It's impossible.
Hassan Piker famously made a video responding to me where he said, I said the military industrial
complex is a bad thing.
The U.S. imperialism imposing its will through financing.
He paused the video and he says he's completely right on this one.
I agree.
And then I said, this is why I don't think Ukraine is a special case.
why the U.S. has given Ukraine more money than Israel in two years than Israel gotten 50.
And then Hassan breaks and goes, this guy actually thinks we shouldn't support Ukraine?
Now, be consistent, buddy.
Are you concerned about U.S. imperial expansion into foreign countries, or are you simply pretending that's the case?
You could not map the logic of their principles or plan for this country.
It's about feelings.
I think it is, but if you break it down, it's largely about adhering to the murmuration.
The left swings around randomly and random directions.
directions. Nobody knows exactly where they're turning left or right or up or down. They're just
trying to make sure they stay safely in a position where someone else won't bludgeon them
with a bike lock. So Tesla is a great example. Two years ago, Stephen Colbert bragged on his show he
owns a Tesla. Today, he's making jokes about how it's funny that people are firebombing them.
Well, that not makes sense. You've got innocent people. Yeah, but again, you could play this game
both ways. You could say all these people used to say Trump is a loose cannon and is a crazy
and whatever. Now they're all in his White House.
Some of them. But I always
point to tendencies.
There is a cult on the right that
Trump can do no wrong. And I've criticized
these people very heavily. They attacked Joe
Rogan and I'm like, are you guys nuts?
Joe Rogan's a moderate who speaks to
many different people of all persuasions.
Let them cook, bro. And they attacked me for it.
I said, I don't give a shit. I was like,
you guys are nuts. While
vocal, they don't dictate. They don't control.
It's true. On the left, you
better at here or else. So I would say, let's just try and be as fair, I suppose, and say it's
two to one cult on the left and two to one not cult on the right. Maybe 30% of the right is culty,
60% of the left is cult. So even the culty elements of the right will be forced to entertain
arguments they do not appreciate or like. The left does not. And more importantly,
even those who are rather culty on the right
will still try to give you a reason
as to why they support Trump,
the reason why they've changed their views.
Oh, Donald Trump is doing something authoritarian.
Well, you know, because of this that are otherwise,
I've changed my mind. On the left,
it doesn't make sense.
Famously, the coalition for communities of color
said, Slavic people are people of color.
So blonde-haired, blue-eyed Lucred Kowski
is a person of color.
how the fuck does that make sense that's the world they live in slavs are oppressed peoples you get the one of my
favorite scandals was several years ago the whimmickson scandal i know you're probably saying what the
what the fuck is that word woman where the the e is an x yeah and they said this way we're being
inclusive of all women including trans women and women of color well within a week of using this
they were attacked by trans activists because they said trans women women are women and by creating a new
word, you are now arguing that trans women need a special classification, so you're transphobic.
Listen, man, you don't need to persuade us that the left went full retard.
Genuinely, because we are people who always thought, you say, liberal, like, that's how
we always thought of ourselves.
And then we just looked at that and went, oh, my God, what the fuck is going on?
And then we got ostracized for saying that.
Exactly.
That's a...
Oh, I was curious to ask you, though, is do you think...
We were here during the election, before the election and after the election.
We were there during that entire time.
And a lot of people anticipated a lot of street violence, a lot of protests, a lot of, and there was none of that.
Like, we were in LA when the election happened.
And the people we've been seeing all over the rest of the country were like, well, you guys are going in to see some riots over there.
And it was chill as hell because I just think everybody accepted the outcome.
Do you not think that that, look, do you think it's possible that these flare-ups like the BLM riots of 20,
like the riots we had in the UK.
These are part of living in societies
that are struggling economically,
they're racially mixed, et cetera, et cetera.
And eventually, these things balance themselves out.
It's possible. Also, historically, these things turn to civil wars.
So pick your history, which one do you think is going to happen?
I don't know that civil war is greater than 50%.
I'm just saying that when you get all these experts coming out
and saying, yikes, we're in civil war conditions.
I mean, Jamie Raskin literally said a year ago that should Trump win, we will be faced with civil war conditions, and it'll be our job in Congress to tell Donald Trump, you are not eligible to be president and deny him that.
They didn't do it.
I think they realized they lack the, let's just say, wartime resources to actually engage in this.
But I think the real reason they didn't is, as Chuck Schumer just said recently, they've planted 235 progressive judges in the federal courts.
in D.C. largely with the intention of blocking Trump no matter what he does. I'm being a little hyperbolic.
He said to stop Donald Trump's agenda. Now we can see the lawful exercise of power that Donald Trump
is trying to use is being blocked no matter what. At absurdum, the president engages in negotiations
with a foreign country for the extradition of non-citizen enemies of this nation, street gangs
from another country that have been labeled domestic terror. The Alien Enemies Act,
the president can do this. And additionally, in 1948, there was a court case, a federal court case,
which ruled there is no judicial review for this process. You want to change it? Absolutely. Let's change it.
I'm totally fine with that. In the meantime, Donald Trump is within his rights as the chief executive
to enter negotiations with the president of a foreign country as for the deportation and transport
of criminals. A lower court judge instructed him to return these people to this country,
turn the plane around. Now, on the surface, the media is saying,
Trump can't deport. No, no, no, no, no. The judge ruled that Donald Trump must sever his negotiations with a world leader from a foreign country.
Imagine it was something more serious. Tim, can I just stop you on that? Because I was reading in a publication in the UK that the reason was because a lot of the guys hadn't been convicted of anything.
They don't need to be.
1948 alien enemies act it's already been precedent has already been set there is no judicial review for non-citizen
combatants under the alien enemies act okay the so the why do we have a president finally fathers were very smart
they got together and they said should we do a representative democracy oh no it's going to devolve into squabbles
you can't react properly to emergencies should we do a council of elders smart learned men that we can
point. Same problem. And then what if you get many tyrants and they can't agree? Should we do a king?
No, we have problems with kings. And they said, let's do all three. And they can argue amongst themselves.
We'll bestow specific powers among each. That way we give the strength to each. The Council of Elders, review the process of both and determine whether or not they can or can. That's a Supreme Court.
Representative democracy will determine the laws of this country. The executive will handle war and the upholding of our laws.
each has the ability to check the other in one way or another.
As it pertains to foreign military actions, the president has plenary powers, but he can't declare wars.
He can't set the budget for wars.
He can simply direct how we engage with what Congress determines.
If Congress passes a lawsuit creating the Department of Education, and they say the function of the Department of Education shall be A, B, and C, the President cannot displace.
mandill it through executive order. The president can, however, instruct the people who are working there
to stop using computers and to juggle bowling pins instead, which would effectively shut down
Congress's attempt. That's one way they can check that power. In issues of foreign policy first,
the problem we have in this country is we haven't declared war since World War II. Congress has
effectively given the executive branch carte blanche, which has been a big mistake, but now when we're
dealing with Trenda-Iraga, we all know it's a problem. I believe there should be transparency,
but these people got the due process they deserve through our system.
Trump needs to prove to the public these are the people we claim they to be because we don't
want Trump to round up random people and lie about it.
Crump people can do that.
However, what's happened with these court rulings, it is not a question of can Trump do this.
It is a question of should we continue to do this?
So the actions Donald Trump took are permitted and a judge tried to sever a binding international
negotiation. If Donald Trump went to Netanyahu right now and said, stop bombing Gaza, or we will
pull all military assets from Israel and cut your funding tonight? And then Netanyahu said, no,
we're going to double the bombings. Trump then says, load up our planes, send our boys home.
Imagine what would happen if a lower court, city judge banged the gavel and said, cancel Trump's
negotiations of Netanyahu, return all the military assets to Israel so they can continue the bombing
campaign, completely undermining our ability to negotiate. A better example would be Trump and Putin.
Trump goes to Putin and says, we're going to end the war in Ukraine tonight. You are going to
withdraw from the Donbass. Putin says, only if you remove all military assets and support to the Ukrainians.
Trump says, done. Then a lower court judge bangs the gavel and says, Trump has no authority to do this.
The war remains. If that were the case and that were possible, no world leader would ever negotiate
with our president ever again. It would require the executive branch to get permission from lower court
judges putting the executive branch underneath the judicial. But a better example than all this
is that Donald Trump, as the commander in chief, determines who is fit to serve and who serves.
He signed an executive order saying, I'll give you the simple version. If you are suffering from
gender dysphoria and exhibiting symptoms, you are barred from service in the military.
If you are suffering from gender dysphoria and showing no symptoms, you are fine. We will give you
exceptions. Judge Rays in D.C. ruled Trump cannot discriminate against anyone for any reason. I'm not
kidding. Literally, the injunction was preliminary, so it has changed in the past few days. The initial injunction
stated, quote, all means all. And anybody, that's actual quote, but we're going to say,
anybody who wants to enlist should be allowed to. This means that bipolar manic paraplegics
should be brought into basic training. That makes no sense. Or someone suffering from bulimia.
who's in basic training and decides, after a chow hall, I'm going to vomit all over the floor,
must be affirmed in their mental disorder.
That's psychotic.
And a lower court ruled the president must have them serve his army?
That makes no sense.
The president could simply say, sure, they're in the military.
And now I'm going to go order them to sit in a warehouse in the back corner where they can't do anything.
The president can do that.
So it looks like, to go back to the initial point, one of the scenarios that I believe is possible, of course,
is that we're on the back end of whatever this cold civil war is.
The administrative forces that have been seeking to obstruct the mega movement,
the populist movement are weak and being crushed.
That's why there were no riots after Trump won in 2024.
There's just no energy for it.
And people are actually fed up with what the Democratic administration had been bringing us.
Now what we are seeing is the first order in Star Wars.
The empire's gone.
But there still are angry remnants that don't.
want to give up the fight. I'm hoping, throughout the next couple of years, the judges either get
impeached or stop and give up. The activists decide the violence isn't worth it. Trump starts arresting
these people. The swatters get hunted down by Dan Bongino. The Tesla attacks result in 20-year prison
sentences. And then in two years, everything looks kind of like 1997. That may be the case.
And I hope it is. Civil strife sometimes doesn't turn into civil war. I'm hoping that's where we are.
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And I think one of the things that you touched on, and the things that I always find shocking here from a purely outside point of view, is a number of mentally ill people that you have in this country.
And that, when you have mentally ill people, plus easy access to guns, that can create a situation where a presidential assassination attempt can happen or even, God forbid, an actual assassination.
And that's a sort of thing that can spark a civil war, or any type of war.
What's the political persuasion of the mental ill?
It's a fact. It's documented.
I don't know.
Liberals.
Not just liberals.
Look it up.
No, no, hold on.
What you're saying is if you look at the mentally ill population, they skew left.
They skew like 60, 70% left.
The argument from the left is that people on the right don't seek therapy so they don't get prescribed.
Perhaps.
But overwhelmingly, it is liberal females, followed by liberal males.
liberals have extremely high
rates of mental illness
relative to conservatives.
Let's be real. Someone who's going to throw a firebomb
at a Tesla and right long live Ukraine, they don't know
what they're fighting for. They're mentally ill.
So,
I guess what all we're saying is it's not
like mentally ill
right-wing people with guns have never
done anything.
How many right-wing terror attacks have there been in the United
States in the past 10 years?
Look, we have the same argument
in the UK, which is like we're told to war,
about the far right when a lot of it is Islamist.
The statement you made is a little bit over generalizing.
Well, I'm not trying to speak in episodes.
I'm speaking in generalities.
Yeah.
If you, uh, and,
and my point is this.
Why is it that right now,
what we see is people who are mentally ill
have like a two to one rate of leaning towards liberal ideology?
Well, because the ideology itself is fractured and the people
like me or like you have abandoned it or maybe not abandoned,
but are no longer a part of it.
it. So it's not so much a function of, if you're a liberal, you are mentally ill. It's a function of
the current iteration of the liberal social cohort is not conducive to a rational person's
political ideology. They leave that space, leaving behind only the irrational, creating a higher
density of people who are unwell. So it's the reverse correlation. It's not that you read
liberal ideology and your brain stops working. It's that people who don't want violence,
and are not mentally ill, have abandoned it because mentally ill people have been attacking them and destroying their lives.
Now there tends to be a higher proportion of those are mentally ill attracted to that cohort.
Right, okay, but there's also as well, there's people I walk out on the streets of New York or any city in America,
and I see people who are utterly, utterly sick.
They're completely sick, and it's got nothing to do with ideology.
Agreed.
Yeah, and that is a very, very real problem, because that is also showing the fact that,
you are not looking after these people.
These people need to be looked after.
Agreed.
Bring the asylums back.
Explain.
I think it was Ronald Reagan
who got rid of the mental institutions.
You can't put...
I worked for a homeless nonprofit.
I worked for actually a couple different versions
of either helping starving children
or helping homeless and homeless youth.
One of the most frustrating things about liberals,
I'll give a shout to our friend Kyle Kalinsky.
He had made a post about
allocating money to homeless shelters
and how we won't help the homeless.
And the most frustrating thing about it
is they don't know the first thing
about why these people are homeless.
One of my favorite phrases
working in this industry at the time,
this is 15 years ago, was,
feed the homeless.
They'd say, we need to raise money
to feed the homeless.
I said, why are they foodless or are they homeless?
Why are you assuming that
because someone doesn't have a house,
they also don't have food?
Because they don't actually know
what's going on with these people.
Why are people homeless?
First and foremost, they choose to be.
And they want.
to be. So when I lived in Seattle, you got a group of kids called the Avrats. They lived on
University Avenue. They moved from across the country to join this click of homeless teenage and
20-something-year-olds. Ain't no way you're getting them off the street. It's their adventure
by choice. They do drugs and they party. And the liberals donate money to NGOs. The NGOs know
they can't get these kids off the streets. They know they can't stop the drug use. Why are
who are down and out, who find themselves homeless, I think the average is two weeks,
and they're no longer homeless.
Guy gets fired from his job as a contractor, a company goes out of business, can't pay his
rent, falls on hard times, welfare check doesn't come through or unemployment check.
He's outside, bushy mustache holding up a sign saying, I've lost everything and I don't
know what to do.
Within two weeks, that guy's, within a few days, usually these guys, they go to the shelters,
knock on the door and say, I don't want to be homeless, I'm trying to find a place to live,
I will do anything it takes.
They say, you can sleep here.
These homeless shelters, they tend to be empty.
Because the people who are actually consistently homeless choose to be or are mentally ill and cannot be helped.
Homeless shelters say, we have a curfew.
You're in at six.
You can't leave until six.
So no one's going to come.
You also can't do drugs or drink.
No one's going to come.
The problem we have in this country is that we used to say, if you are engaged in public
lewdness, degeneracy, and I don't mean that in a colloquial sense, I mean literal laws
about indecent exposure and obscenities.
Yeah, and just again, for people who haven't been to America,
like, I remember somebody,
I was talking to an American and he went,
you know, it's like a third world country.
And I was like, I have been to a lot of third world countries.
I haven't seen this shit.
The stuff you see in L.A.,
like we were in Nashville just walking around the town center.
There's just like half-naked people lying face down on the sidewalk.
So we can do, there are solutions.
The solutions, I suppose,
escape a liberal society, at least of the United States's persuasion. In Northern California,
they decided to force conservatorship on the homeless. If you were homeless for a certain amount of time,
they would lock you up by force and seize your assets and your income. This was frowned upon.
It's fascism. Individuals are free. They can do what they weren't. Yeah. They said we got too many
homeless people. They're mentally ill. They received paychecks from the government that they cash and then
that's not on drugs. We're going to take their money, spend it for them, and use that money to put them in a shelter.
Maybe we have to. Is that authoritarian? What if there's someone of sound mind who simply chooses to sleep outside?
Is that illegal? Should we make it a crime? They've begun to do so. You can no longer sleep in these cities.
West Virginia just passed a law. It's now illegal to sleep in public places completely. Maybe that's what
looking after someone actually looks like. If they're mentally ill, that's kind of the point, really. And, and, and, and you're
You're right. From what I understand, from what I've read about it, it's the ideological closing
of these facilities, some of which were fucking horrible, by the way, let's be honest, right?
But if you had a place where mentally ill people were properly looked after, that's way
better for them than being out on the street. And I also agree with you about the left or liberal,
you guys use these words differently to us, which is it's this idea that being in a fentanyl coma
on the street is freedom.
Right.
That's been, they, they've got very confused about what freedom means, right?
Yep.
And that is definitely a part of it.
But I think Francis's point was that you've got a very tense situation, as you yourself
say, a hell of a lot of mentally ill people around.
And you do have guns, which means that, I mean, guns are a force multiply.
I don't need to explain that to you.
So if you've got someone who wants to do something, it is a hell of a lot easier for them to go
and do it, then it would be in the UK?
Sure. Yeah.
I'm making your argument for you.
Well, I agree.
We saw in Seattle and Portland,
leftists with powerful weapons,
taking over parts of their city,
Minnesota, Atlanta, and killing people with them.
I'm not sure that giving the government's
sole access to the weapons,
to weapons solves the problem for you.
So the issue of America, obviously, is not,
I don't believe it's the government.
guns, the guns are the force multiplier, which will change circumstances relative to the UK.
The issue is our culture, which, as I was saying before, you take a population in the UK and in
Spain and, you know, other parts of Europe, and then only those willing to travel across the ocean
for three months and die, make it, then those people have tons of babies.
Guess what culture is going to be spreading?
A wild west frontiersman pioneer.
Don't fuck with me, I've got a gun mentality.
So that's why we like our guns.
And that's why you guys don't.
You know, it is really fascinating.
I think about today the liberals and how they handle things.
And now it probably is, to a certain degree, ideologically similar to what it must have been like during the colonial period when you lived in London.
It's a very dense population.
There's an elite.
There's lords.
There's academics.
And the poor people were like, there's no space for me to be here.
I have no free speech, air quotes, freedom of religion.
Let's go live in the barren wastes.
Let's go build something somewhere else.
And that mentality created the United States.
But now we're getting soft through luxury
and we're becoming more population dense
and we're starting to become more ideologically like
how Europe was back then.
I think also as well,
what's really interesting is there's another part of the puzzle
that you were founded essentially by religious extremists.
Like people who were going,
I want to practice my religion to this extreme,
which isn't accepted.
So you are a nation of people who, dare I say,
You were a little bit intense.
Extremely intense.
Yeah.
But let's not, you know, it's not only the British who came here.
Yeah.
The Spanish came and you let Germans announce.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they're like those.
Can I, can I say something just totally off topic, which is really amazing?
Yeah, go on.
Have you ever seen the flags outside of a store that says open?
They have big flags, they fly in front of stores.
And it says open on it.
And it's red, white, and blue.
So to me, it was instantly obvious the history of these flags.
I was driving in a car with my wife.
And I said, notice all the Dutch flags everywhere?
And she was like, the Dutch flags.
Yeah, the open flags.
It literally says open on it.
And I said, how much you want to bet?
When the Dutch came to the colonies, setting up trade posts, they flew Dutch flags, which
people associated then with marketplaces.
So now we traditionally fly Dutch flags with open signs to represent a business.
That's exactly what happened.
So call the country a bunch of religious extremists.
Don't forget, a bunch of free market capitalists came here from the Netherlands to sell junk.
the people. By the way, it might be coming across as like we're anti-gun. We fire guns every time
we come to America. They're great. It's a lot of fun. And I've always said, I like living in a country
where we don't have guns. But if I lived in America, I would definitely own a far-round.
I feel bad for you guys. They arrested Count Dengela for making a joke, a funny one. And then he
followed up with a funnier one. And you got people being arrested for saying naughty words on the
internet. The point of guns in the United States may be to protect it from both foreign and domestic,
whatever you want to argue. The disstanding militia was the defense of a nation, but there's
something that guns do. When a police officer wants to come into your house and arrest you in America,
they are terrified they might die. They think twice about it. They want to make sure they have
warrants. They want to make sure they have requisite force. And they want to make sure they're getting it
right. In the UK, there's no fear of that. A little bit. Maybe it's a little bit. Maybe it's on
Someone's got a knife, kitchen knife somewhere.
But in the UK, they know they can kick your door in, and you ain't doing nothing about it.
That doesn't mean anybody should be shooting cops, but it does mean that when the police went to the home of Brianna Gray was that, they kicked the door and they were terrified.
And they had guns.
They got shot at.
They shot back shooting her boyfriend, killing her in the process.
The left lied about it.
That's not here or there.
The point was, police in this country are terrified.
if you're a rogue cop and you're going to break the law and you know it, you'll die.
And then no one in the system will defend you.
I mean, maybe there's dirty cops.
But for the most part, cops know if I'm going in, we need to make sure we're doing this clean and proper and knocking.
Because in the instance of Brianna Gray, they yelled, they didn't hear anything.
They break the door in.
They get shots fired.
That's something that all law enforcement's country should be fearing.
And I'm glad they do.
But nobody should shoot cops.
No, we completely agree.
But I also think when talking about the First Amendment and Hirty words is you have a First
Amendment.
That is really important.
It's baked into your culture.
It's actually, I would argue, the literal best thing about your culture.
It's why you're so successful.
It's why your economy flourishes because of that, the belief in the being able to share ideas,
no matter how controversial.
We simply don't see it as valuable, Tim.
And that's the tragedy.
And to my view, that's one of the main reasons we're in the problem.
that we're in. What does free speech mean? The free speech? What does it mean? Free speech to me means the
ability to voice an opinion, however controversial. So advocating for pedophiles? Yes. Advocating for murder.
Advocating and inciting are two different things. That's right. So advocating for murder is good?
I wouldn't say it's good, but I'd say you should be allowed to do it. I mean cleared and protected under
the under free speech philosophy. Well, I get like, you borrow pedophiles and murder.
Like, if someone says, I think paedophiles should be shot, like, I'm down with someone being able to say that.
I'm not down with going around and shooting random people who you might think are paedophiles.
Yeah.
What about telling someone, if you really hate, insert per, if you are really concerned about thing, you would go kill person.
Is that free speech?
Give me an example that's not.
Like, if a popular Twitch streamer said, if you cared about healthcare, you would murder and then names a prominent U.S. senator.
That sounds to me like you'll get very close.
to incitement to violence. Really close. So there are free speech absolutists who disagree with you
and say speech is speech. Yeah, yeah. But that's what I've always said I'm not a free speech
absolutus for about 53 different reasons. I completely agree with you guys. One of them by the way,
and this speaks to the online conversation we were having, is that once you begin to run a platform,
and you see it with everyone who's ever owned a platform of any kind. You can't have it be completely
free because even that person begins to impose their own values on the thing. And it says,
well, this kind of speech is too far. And there will always be something that's too far.
Yeah, it applies to everything. So what's your point? You feel, you feel, you're, I feel the
First Amendment is great. Yeah. Yeah. The First Amendment was smart in that it created a, I don't know,
I would call it a piece of cloth over, over a river to try and hold the water back.
Waitstots is a commentator. He's got a bunch of great videos. And one of the,
him, he talked about the Constitution. He says, what is a Constitution? Constitution refers to
what constitutes the body politic. So in the UK, you claim to have an unwritten constitution.
Actually, most countries have what's called an unwritten constitution. It implies that the people
of this nation agree on what is or is not acceptable. In the United States, because you had a
bunch of different states of various values of across a large piece of land, you had some of the
founding fathers being like, no, no, no, no, no, you better write this down because I don't believe you.
Here's the problem. We don't agree on what free speech is. On the extreme ends of what we described as the left, they say hate speech is incitement. Should not be protected. In the middle, you have the free speech political absolutists, meaning don't incite crimes or violence, but express your opinions. That's where I'm at. And I largely agree. But there are some philosophical challenges. And then you have the free speech absolutists that say words should never be illegal. Telling someone when or how to do something is not an action that should be at fault for.
The problem is, for those of us in the middle, what we're really arguing is that we've determined there's a moral line that should be adhered to, which provides people to communicate but doesn't provide for crimes.
The problem with that mentality, though I agree with you where we should be, that's why I believe morals actually outweigh a lot of what we think are principles.
The problem with it is, if I say on paper, you can't incite someone to violence.
and then all the judge needs say is, well, if you go online and say all Jews are X and deserve X, you've incited violence.
And then we've determined that there is a threshold by which the law can restrict speech that the law, the government, the judges determine would or would not be incitement.
The standard that we go by in the United States is creating imminent harm.
So if you said, I think person should die, not illegal.
if you said someone should kill a person, still not legal.
If you said, at this time, I want you to go and do this thing, you have now created an imminent threat and that is illegal.
There still then is the argument that at some point a leftist will get in under that moral philosophy and say, well, I believe calling an entire group of people creates an incitement and you need only a simple majority to get that codified in law and then it happens.
Yeah, but this is why we shouldn't. I think the, I think the,
The problem has been is that people argue about these things and slogans and there's a lot of sloganeering about.
Actually, there's never going to be any clarity.
It's always going to be up to some level of debate, unless you say anyone should be able to say anything, which I think ignores the reality of the interconnected world we live in.
And somebody could send out a tweet.
And if their platform is large and if enough people, that could cause real world harm.
And that's a fact.
And now you're talking about morality-based laws versus principle-based laws.
You are arguing that a society should be, uh, society's laws should be predicated upon what a, what a moral person of your morality should believe.
If we were principles based, we'd say, you can say anything, words are not crying, but we are a moral based people.
We actually determine at some point laws should or should not apply based on our personal morality.
We have things called blue laws, for instance, which is laws that were passed that were deemed to blaspheme or to violate Christian.
tenants. We don't really enforce
a lot of these that much anymore, but in Virginia, for instance,
you can't sell cars on Sundays.
There are certain laws like, you can't
have a bath on Tuesdays in Boston.
I don't know if it's exactly that, but you get the point.
Nobody's going to enforce that. Because it
no longer aligns with our morality.
So in this case, what's the point of writing the law
down if the police do or do not enforce certain
things based on what our personal morals
are? The Constitution ends up becoming
meaningless when you start to look at
where we are with a morally divergent society.
You have those of the Christian
moral tradition. Some are secular, but still adhere to a Christian moral tradition. And then you have
the new, I would refer to Peter Bogosian's non-theistic religion of intersectionality or
awokeness. Their moral traditions and moral foundation is a mirror image to the Christian or
classically liberal moral tradition. The laws invert themselves in this regard. For example,
the question I often ask people, do you believe that a parent should have final say as to the medical
decisions of their child? Yes or no? Yes.
No, no.
No, no.
Okay, so this, so.
For instance, if a child is going to die because they can't receive a blood transfusion
and the parent is Jehovah's Witness and it's a matter of life or death, like,
yeah, fuck that.
Okay.
The child gets a blood transfusion.
I don't consider that.
So you've now set the precedent, right?
Yeah.
In court, if a doctor deems life-saving treatment is necessary, the parents must be overruled.
It's very easy to get from there to trans.
I see what.
Exactly, which is exactly what happened.
Yeah.
Under the exact same principle espoused by both, you have conservatives saying, we should not allow the state.
So you have in Florida, the state should not be allowed to decide for the parents what is right for their children.
Trans is out. In California, the life of the child is paramount. The courts must decide.
But this also lends itself to another scenario, vaccination and mandated vaccines. So, and abortion, for instance.
depending on what your morality is,
your view of whether or not a
person has a right to decide for their child
changes. Most conservatives
would say, I don't think
I say the parent has the final
say. Another question for you.
Okay, so
you said yes, you said no.
Yeah, but this is
now, no, before you get into it, this is
the point I was going to make. I actually
hadn't considered the Jehovah's weapons. I'm going to change
your mind. I'm going to change both of your minds
right now. Well, so you go to
California. And the parents say, my child is depressed. They go to the doctor. The doctor says,
your child is just being a teenager. They're suffering from a depression. It's an episode. They'll be fine.
And they say, doctor, no, my child is trans, and I want the surgery. And the doctor says,
I'm not going to let, I disagree. I refuse to do this. Should the parents be allowed to get transgender
surgery for their child if they're seeking active affirmation from a doctor? This is the point I was going to make,
which is the reason we litigate all of this stuff to the extent that we do is there are not going to be easy answers.
You could go down this route or that route, which is why I'm always, I've always been very persuaded by the argument that the government should be as close to the people as possible because people can then opt into a community that shares their values.
This is one of the great things about this country, right?
The point I'm making is that your principle is completely meaningless. It adheres only the moral structure of the community.
Yeah.
If you go to a liberal and say a doctor is denying life-saving gender treatment the parents are begging for.
If you go to a conservative, should the state intervene to save a child from parents who are going to transom, they say yes.
Should the state intervene to stop to protect a child if the parents won't let it get trans?
Right. The views are inverted on both sides based on morals, not principles.
So what's your point?
We don't live in a principles-based society.
We live in a morals-based society.
And if you argue that we have free speech, it stops where your moral line stops and you don't actually believe in free speech.
And what's your point from that?
That we have a large faction of people in this country, namely when we're talking about free speech or you say that it's enshrines in our public.
We don't.
We don't have free speech.
We have certain moral lines that entertain when it is or is not acceptable to say certain words.
And then we protect ourselves from feeling bad about what we think is wrong by claiming we're for free speech.
For instance, if you go in public and scream racial slurs, sure, you have free speech, but you'll be canceled.
But the left has a much lighter threshold than the right.
The right claims, we're for free speech, we're for free speech until it comes to the issue of Israel.
And now all of a sudden, you're going to deport people and shut them down because as the Department of Justice said, this activist's words aligned with Hamas, aligned with.
Now, I'm of the, I follow the law.
And if you want to change the law, change the law.
The Secretary of State has the right to rescind a visa and deport somebody.
But let's be real.
There are so many people who argue you are being anti-Semitic on campus and we shouldn't
allow it that claim they were free speech until it met their moral line.
And they said, but that one doesn't count.
And I'm not trying to disparage those people for believing that.
I'm simply pointing out, everyone's going to argue my principles direct me, know your moral
community.
I don't think it's everyone.
Like for me, for example, look,
In that particular instance, I think there are two things that I would say.
The first one is, unless someone's been convicted of a crime, I don't consider them a criminal, usually.
Now, there are exceptions to this, people who have blatantly, like, got away with that or whatever.
But in this guy's case, I don't think there's any clear evidence that he's like a terrorist, even though terrorist support it, even though I'm sure he is, right?
But this doesn't pretend to law.
How do you mean?
The second, under the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
I know.
You don't need to be a criminal.
I understand that.
what I'm saying is for me, as someone who thinks free speech is important, but also doesn't
like Hamas supporters, I would probably err on the side of this guy being allowed to stay in
if I was an American citizen, on the one hand. On the other hand, I'm not an American citizen,
and when I come here, I don't go around starting protests because it's kind of a dushy thing
to do. Like, if you let me in your house, I'm probably going to behave in a slightly different
way than I would in my own house, right? So, and Francis and I, like, when we visit the United
States, we are respectful to the fact that it's not our country. There are certain things that we may
legally be entitled to do here that we wouldn't do. Because when you are an immigrant or a visitor
to a country, you need to behave in a way that's not just in accordance with the law, but you have
an added responsibility, basically not to be a dick. I agree. So the issue is when it comes to
the principles versus morals. If you believe in free speech, when do you stop? Where is your line?
And the point is free speech in its purest form is absolutism.
You can say whatever you want.
Do you believe all people have a right to free speech?
Well, now you're going to find a mix of morals on the right.
Many on the right are going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but only for American citizens.
I never meant for non-citizens to come here and speak against our country.
And they're being honest.
They never did.
There was a period where we all agreed what the left is doing with big tech is violating our free speech.
Of course, to be honest, the left then conflates the First Amendment with free speech,
which are two completely different things.
But then when it comes to the issue of should we deport a green card holder, temporary green card holder, because of his speech, a lot of people are going to say, well, yeah, absolutely.
To be fair, he organized protests that took over buildings and threatened staff and caused fights and led to violence.
So I have no problem with that guy being deported.
I just think that you get these anti-Semitism bills that are getting passed where, like, universities can't allocate funds or allow for certain protests.
Otherwise, we'll pull funding.
It goes against American foreign policy.
and I'm like, I have no problem with you doing it.
I see that's where your morals lie.
I just like to point out to everybody
who claims they support free speech.
I bet I can find a point at which you will say
that's not free speech.
So like Myron Gaines, for instance,
said, I'm for free speech.
And I said, what about porn?
No, porn's not free speech.
Okay, well, the woman on the show
who was an only fan's creators said,
absolutely it is.
It is my expression.
It is my views.
And it's age-gated and costs money.
Why can't I do it?
Two different complete moral lines
on whether one thing is free speech or not.
So I bring this up because where we are right now in this country, you have Donald Trump trying to engage in actions, which are largely popular, maybe depending on it's tough.
For the first time in 20 years, the country is on the right track to the highest degree.
I mean, single polls don't mean much to me, but we're seeing some form of this.
Despite the fact that people kind of don't approve of Donald Trump, his aggregate approval ratings in the margin of error, which is really good for him, by the way.
But a lot of what he does is popular.
You have people now arguing when we should or should not obey judges.
On the left, the liberals, liberal is a colloquial term in the United States for the left faction.
It doesn't really mean liberal.
They are willing to imprison lawyers.
They are willing to cheer for violence, engage in violence.
They have in many instances, more than the right, murdered people.
And that's in line with their morality.
when it now comes to Trump and the right having power to use, Republicans are often mocked for refusing to use it.
We could expel Democrats from Congress right now, Al Green, for not only was he to be censured for interrupting the not-so state of the union, state of the union, but when he was being censured, he, along with many other Democrats, blocked the proceedings and obstructed it, and Johnson simply adjourned.
Should we not use power to the degree that they have used, but it's against our principles. Is it? Our moral world is being.
crushed by these people. Do we decide today we will defend our moral worldview and traditions
by any means necessary? Or will we keep saying that we afford our enemies special privileges they do not
afford us? My view is that I'll say 10 years ago, I was free speech for everyone even if we don't
agree. I don't agree with what you say it, but I'll defend the death. You're right to say it.
And then they bludgeoned me over the head with it and try to destroy my life. And I said,
that was stupid of me. Free speech is for those that live within the confines of our moral
community. If you are an individual who's a communist and you stand up for free speech at every
turn, you reject violence and say, one day I hope we achieve communism. I would say, well, I think
your idea is dumb, but if they ever come to censor you, I got your back. Most communists, however,
celebrate your demise and advocate it and try to make it happen, in which case I say, why would
I avoid them quarter? My view is, we have rights in the United States. We protect the rights of
those in the United States, even if they're not citizens. There's a very much.
degree of how much you will be protected and what your due process, what process you are actually
do, we wouldn't extend that to jihadis or ISIS or Soleimani. So if you are Abdulraman Al-Aliqi, a 16-year-old
American citizen and you're eating dinner in Yemen, Barack Obama has no right to murder you, which he did.
And this is, in my view, because he was the son of Anwar Al-Aki, a terrorist. I think the message
Obama was trying to send to the world is that if you speak against us, we'll murder your children.
Anwar Alalaki was a jihadi.
He was an American, though.
He was in a foreign country.
I believe he was in Yemen.
Barack Obama had no right to murder him.
American citizens are of voter protections anywhere they are in the world.
You can't just murder Americans.
Here's what things get tricky.
What if that American is running towards American troops with a machine gun?
Okay, well, that's self-defense.
Like, we understand, you could be in America.
Obama ordered a drone strike to kill a guy, arguing he's an enemy combatant.
He doesn't deserve trial.
Now, he has to get trial.
So the issue I see is we don't extend the same rights
to our enemy combatants and adversaries around the world.
Why would we do the same?
Why would we do the inverse for the domestic enemy?
I hate to say the word enemy,
but when you have far leftists firebombing vehicles
and smashing them up and destroying things,
why would I defend their protests,
defend their free speech,
or defend their moral worldview
when they don't do it to me?
Because you can defend their free speech
while also seeing them convicted for the crimes they commit.
I'm not going to engage in a war
over a moral worldview and the future.
of my country where I extend privileges and benefits to those who seek to kill me.
Well, those aren't privilege and benefits. Those are the rules by which society operates.
I would agree with 83% of Americans that Abraham Lincoln is the greatest president we've ever
had. When you ask them who the greatest president was, that's who. And you know the funny thing
about Abraham Lincoln was? He arrested a large portion of the Maryland legislature because they were
sympathetic to the Confederacy. He created a corridor that abolished or suspended habeas corpus between
Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.
so that he could arrest anyone
without charge or trial.
That's what Abraham Lincoln did to preserve this union
and stomp out moral evil in the Confederacy.
And we love him for it.
I don't think 83% of Americans
love him for doing that.
No, but they don't know better.
They don't know about that, I would imagine.
And so if you, and this is the,
this is the conundrum of
our view that we are principled
individuals. When you go into,
if you go to someone and say, would you support
a, if, if right now,
States started arming up in support of Donald Trump and in defiance of the courts and the judges.
Would you support a democratic individual suspending the Constitution to shut down Trump?
You'd find a mixed bag among liberals.
No, that's terrible.
If, how about this?
If Joe Biden, if Donald Trump tried to steal the presidency in January 6th, would you support Joe Biden sending in the National Guard to shut down Donald Trump and arrest anybody on those capital grounds with or without evidence to stop the insurrection?
they're probably to say yes.
People might tell you they don't like what Abraham Lincoln did,
but they're more than happy to tell you how much they love the results.
And so the question then becomes,
do we play this game of, for PR reasons, I'm going to pretend,
like Abraham Lincoln was the bad guy,
or do we say, in times of war, a wartime president makes difficult decisions,
which are outside what our principles purport to be.
But we're not in the time of war.
And it's also as well, Tim.
No, we're not.
Tim, can I just make a point?
We are at a time of war.
Right.
Okay.
We'll come to that in a second.
When you take, when the government takes away rights,
it is very difficult, if not almost impossible,
for you to get them back.
Can we just agree that?
Yes.
So you are willing to give up rights in this society
for the government to then come in and then enact against the enemies.
When have humans ever not done that?
Give me one example.
One.
in civilized society
in world war two the united states implemented the u.s. office of censorship
and banned people from it's interesting that you say this because all the anti- ukraine
people in america keep calling zelensky a dictator for having martial law which is in line
with the ukrainian constitution and not having an election like the ukraine didn't have
he declared it and the constitution says that he can declare it and congress can uphold it
there's an argument that it can be he can overturn it well my point is but i
But I agree in a time of war.
Right.
Presidents do crazy things.
But you are stretching the definition of war way beyond this remand.
No, I'm not.
It's called fifth and sixth generational warfare.
So we have technological advances in conflict, and they alter how we perceive what war is.
If you go back to the earliest days, what is the purpose of a conflict?
Why do wars happen?
Sometimes they're silly.
You don't believe in the same God as me, so you must be destroyed.
I mean, these are largely silly, but they have to do with cultural cohesion.
So they come from somewhere from an evolutionary psychological perspective.
But typically it's resource conflict.
Resource is the principal driver.
I do think it's absolutely hilarious that the East India trading company engaged in warfare that resulted in the death of 50,000 people because black peppercorn was a delicacy, was a luxury in Europe and UK.
But typically it's, I don't have enough food or water and I will take it and my people will not die.
I don't care how I have to get it.
And it's the same thing you see at the root level with a man who steals bread because his family is hungry or whatever.
We still frown upon it.
So the generations of warfare, they evolve.
We see the advance of new technologies and new methodologies in warfare all the time.
If the purpose of warfare is to secure control of a population so you can control its resources,
a tendency for that reason.
Sometimes it's, you know, my God is better than your God,
and your people must adhere to my world to and my beliefs.
So in the United States, we are going through, and this is not my opinion.
This is academics who have assessed what warfare is.
You get to fourth and fifth generational warfare, now sixth.
which people are going to argue it as we form these ideas in academia, six may change.
But fourth and fifth have to do with online political manipulations,
manipulations of influence technologies, and use of insurgency.
Today, it's fair to say that we are in a kinetic conflict.
Civil strife began several years ago in the United States.
Civil strife is not civil war, but there are many people dying.
One of the easiest examples, of course, is Aaron Danielson took two bolts to the chest
from a far leftist Michael Reinhold with a communist tattoo on his next.
for no reason. And now we have the swatting, swattings of conservatives and the firebomings of
Tesla facilities for the specific goal of destroying a company for political reasons, for which now Tesla
stock has gone down. Partially, it's not the only reason. And we've seen Tesla evicted from the
Vancouver Auto Show out of fear of terror attacks. This is war. Now, it may not be full-blown,
hot kinetic conflict. But when you have the arrest of Donald Trump's lawyers, we are dealing with
administrative warfare, which is a degree of administrative
conflict, which we don't see in previous times based on communications technologies. If you go back several
hundred years, how do I secure control of a population? I occupy their street corners with weapons,
and my weapons are better than yours. You've got clubs. I've got pointy sticks with metal on them.
Eventually, we have air strikes, air raids, howitzers, nuclear artillery, and machine guns. I send my guys
to your country. They stand in the street corner. You do as you're told. The people are mad about it.
They might fight back. Today, it's actually really easy. I will flood your community with information that
terrifies you as to what is true and what is not, so you are occupied. Notably, we saw the use of
sock puppets in the Arab Spring, largely in Libya, where, based on a report from Project PM,
the United States Air Force was purchasing from private security contractors sock puppet social media
accounts. One individual would operate 50 fake social media accounts to create the public perception
that the overthrowing of Gaddafi was the right thing to do. The Americans then supported
airstrikes and the collapse of the Libyan government, which I think is largely a horrifying thing,
not that I much care for Libya, but now you have the North African slave trade reigniting and
militias blowing each other up. Why did Americans support it? Because fourth generational,
fifth generational warfare was waged on the American people to make them feel like they were
under occupation, figuratively, but in a sense, literally as well. Why put a man on a street corner with a
machine gun when you can simply inundate them with fake accounts to convince them you must do this or else?
So what we end up with is the era of cancel culture and those bending the knee quite literally to an ideology.
Did most people agree with intersectional feminism and woke ideology? Of course not. It's a minority.
Why did so many people let it happen? Because they feared that there was some group that would come after them and destroy them.
They feared that they were under occupation. That the institutions are controlled. I will lose my job. I will lose my livelihood.
My bank will freeze my accounts. My social media will remove me from society. I have no choice but to live this way, even though I've
don't like it. That is war, but it's changed. And they want you to believe that you're not
fighting a war. But as the faction of bureaucrats and powerful elites who have been running these
companies have been engaging in this war, they've become increasingly more desperate as we,
those of us who believe in more enlightenment principles and have opposed this, have started
to break through and shift dramatically to the point where Donald Trump actually was able to win.
Now we have desperation. And desperation begins more hot conflict. This is why I believe we may be
on the back end of this conflict, we may be coming off of it. But the idea that, to go back to,
you know, a wartime action from a president, I'd put it this way. What does that mean in today's
context? Am I arguing that Donald Trump should go round people up without charge of a trial? Absolutely
not. That you never happen. Trump made it, he jokingly said, but probably only half jokingly,
the people who are firebombing Teslas, maybe they can spend 20 years in an El Salvador in prison,
which I hear are not so good. Mr. President, I do not appreciate you entertaining, violating the
Amendment, American citizens who commit crimes go to American jails, and they should be treated
with dignity and respect, even if we despise them. So I don't appreciate those jokes. And if it comes
to that, and he actually tries sending American citizens to El Salvador, I will be opposed in every
form that I can. And it's going to be interesting if it gets to that degree. That being said,
what it comes to an actual wartime president in Trump is, when Trump issues a legal order,
executive order saying, we will not have these people in our military. I'm the commander in chief.
He's allowed to do it. If a judge tries to stop him, in this administrative conflict, Donald Trump,
I believe, is obligated to say, I have heard the ruling from the court, now try and enforce it,
which is a play on Andrew Jackson's famous quote when the Supreme Court ruled against him.
In the conflict we are in, requisite, a commensurate power.
This guy wasn't the Supreme Court. There's a whole legal process yet to go through, which is part of the American process.
now I appreciate what you're saying, but it just sounds to me like you're redefining wars to give yourself more power.
I didn't define them.
Which is whatever dictators always done in history, which is to say the situation is so bad, I need extra power to deal with it.
Well, look.
Yes or no?
We are not in a war situation.
Is Abraham Lincoln a dictator?
We are not in a war situation.
Was Abraham Lincoln a dictator?
We are not in a war situation is the point.
Okay, you're right.
I'll just say you're right.
Okay, now is Abraham Lincoln a dictator?
So, look, this, Tim, the theoretical examples you give.
It's not a theoretical, it's American history.
Fine, but it's not related to the current moment, which is what we're talking about.
So in the context of...
Let me just lay out the argument that you made.
If I represent it incorrectly, you tell me.
The core of your argument that you're making, right, is that because we are in a fourth, fifth,
six-generational warfare situation, a different set of rules ought to apply.
It's a wartime, therefore, just like you can apply martial law,
like you can suspend this or this or that or whatever.
Right. And the point I'm making to you is this is the argument that every dictator in history
has made. Now, I don't know American history as well as you. And maybe the point that you make
about Abraham Lincoln is relevant in some way. But what I'm saying to you is something completely
different, which is we're not in a war. Okay. So let me ask you a question.
Yeah. Was Abraham Lincoln a dictator yes or not? I don't know. You don't.
If a leader suspended the right to due process for all peoples, is that a dictatorial move?
It depends on the context.
So, like, right now, if Trump said, I'm suspending the constitutional rights and due process for far-left terrorists.
Look, I'm not a legal scholar. That seems pretty fucking extreme to me.
Yeah.
What if Donald Trump decided he was going to arrest the Washington, half of the Washington state body
because they were voting in favor of groups that were attacking Tesla facilities?
What does I mean voting in favor?
So in, let's say in their state body, someone proposes a bill that they will not arrest nor provide any assistance to any individual, any individual in their state who's caught firebombing Tesla facilities or other right aligned institutions.
The state will not enforce the law against them, nor will they aid federal law enforcement.
Yeah, I don't know what the answer to that question is legally.
But my point to you is.
So like, this is the problem.
If you don't know and you have no thoughts on the matter, then I don't know what we're asking.
You can simply say, Tim, may be right. I don't know.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm taking the argument that you're making and interrogating it as I do with every other guest on the show.
So what I'm saying to you is, you've made the claim that we're in the war in order to be able to justify suspending the rules applying equally to everybody.
That's basically what you've done, right?
So when I look outside to the conflict.
When I look outside, I don't see a war that justifies that.
When you look outside in a largely liberal jurisdiction where everyone agrees with each other, you don't see anything justifying?
We've traveled around the United States plenty.
I have never seen anything that justifies instituting martial law in this country.
Fire bombing of Tesla facilities, the shooting them up, the murder and killing of people for political purposes.
That should be dealt with through the criminal justice system.
So first, you are incorrect. I'm not arguing that the conflict we right now warrants anything close to what Abraham Lincoln did.
Okay. Well, you kept bringing him up. That's why I made that assumption.
Because I'm trying to understand what your philosophical and moral view is of a president who does such things at a time.
And what I'm saying to you is you can't compare a context of a civil war.
I'm asking you right now, based on the American Civil War and what was going on, was Abraham Lincoln a dictator for suspending habeas corpus and arresting politicians.
Which is sidestepping my point, which is right now.
I don't think you can answer the question.
I already did answer the question.
You did. You're ignoring the question.
I answered the question by saying you know more about it than me.
Uh-huh.
You remember that?
So do you want to say, I don't know?
I already said that.
So you're not sure.
I've already said that.
But what I'm saying is the example you're bringing up is not relevant to the current situation.
Should Donald Trump invoke the Insurrection Act and send U.S. Army into California, Oregon, and Washington to start hunting down and arresting the terrorist cells that are organizing these attacks?
No, I think the law enforcement can take care of that.
They're not doing it.
What do you mean they're not doing it?
Well, I mean, we've had far-left terrorist cells operating with impunity in many of these jurisdictions.
So let's take a look at, you know, the Chaz Shop, for instance.
I mean, we know those people are.
They're not in jail.
Should Trump go and arrest them?
statute limitation is not expired on those.
Yeah, I don't know how the American legal system works enough to answer that question, but should those people be arrested?
Absolutely.
Okay, if the state law enforcement refuses to do so, should Trump invoke the Insurrection Act and go do it?
I don't know enough about the Insurrection Act.
The Insurrection Act is when Donald Trump can use national.
National Guard or Army to enforce, I believe National Guard, to enforce laws if the local jurisdictions refuse to do so.
Well, on that definition, it seems like you should.
That's literally the instruction.
Well, if that's the definition, if the local law enforcement refuses to enforce the law, then that sounds right.
But see, you keep throwing out these hypothetical examples, which I understand.
From my point of view, what I'm saying to you is just taking the logic of your argument.
I'm not arguing about these specific details.
You're saying, we're in war, therefore we should sustain.
spend the rules applying. No, I'm not saying that.
That is what you said.
I think you're misunderstanding what...
Perhaps. That's what I heard. Yeah.
You're misunderstanding wartime, and you're believing that wartime means men are on a battlefield
shooting at each other. Okay. But that's exactly what I'm saying. You were saying war time
means people are spreading propaganda on social media. Therefore, if I, if whoever I like is in
charge, they've got to be able to act in a way that currently isn't complying with the law.
So... And I'm saying to you, I don't think people spreading propaganda.
and on social media.
I believe that your country is conquered,
and it's because of your moral philosophies and ideologies.
They are weak, and they allow it to be destroyed.
What do you mean by conquered?
Well, I mean, you've got a large influx of non-citizens
with psychotic violent beliefs that are chopping people's heads off in the street.
You're not allowed to talk about it, and you know, without going to jail.
You've got rape gangs that have been operating for decades.
I look at the UK, and it's like, you've got a political body threatening to extradite American citizens.
for us expressing our opinions on our own country.
You can't have screwdrivers in public.
The things that your country has done to its citizenry
is shockingly insane to an American.
And it's absurd that you have such a massive influx
of a disparate ideology coming into your country
and imposing its will on you,
and you do nothing about it.
And in fact, your government largely protects supports and votes for it.
I mean, that's insane.
Hold on, no, wait, whoa, whoa, slow down.
So, first of all, there are lots of us
who don't agree with what's happening and say so.
What are you doing about it?
Let me just answer your question.
So there are lots of us who disagree
and are voicing our opinions about it.
I'm as concerned as you are about the fact
that some people are visited by the police.
I'm one of the most outspoken people in the UK about that.
That's not to say that you can't express
disagreement with what's happening
and you will instantly go to prison.
Instantly, but a lot of people
I mean, people, with it Speaker's Corner or whatever, I'm not as familiar with the name of the location.
Getting arrested.
People getting arrested for speech is something that shouldn't be happening.
A woman who is standing outside of an abortion clinic with her eyes closed getting arrested?
What's your point? I've already said that lots of us who disagree.
What are you doing to stop that?
Well, there is a very large political movement that's organizing in exactly the same way that there's a political movement in this country against the...
How did you get to that point in your country?
Overreach of the left. It got to the point because there are lots and lots of people who believe a lot of this
progressive ideology in our country.
Do you think that a certain point, violence will break out between two different factions
in your country?
Well, we already had it.
And I think it's credible that that could continue to be the case as these tensions brew.
Absolutely.
So what it means to be a wartime president, the point I'm making is that Trump used commensurate
actions against those who engage the actions against him.
Okay.
What I'm saying is, Kea Stama in our country during the riots, could do the exact thing
that you're demanding.
He could say, well, look, these people are rioting.
They're attacking the police.
I need special powers to put these people in prison for a tweet.
That's the logic of your argument.
Every country ever has done this.
And the view that you take is dictators do this.
Abraham Lincoln wasn't a dictator.
Abraham Lincoln was a president who saw actions that were seditious.
And he took...
There was one man who thought Abraham Lincoln was a dictator.
So Kirstarmer should not be able to put rioters in prison for tweets then, on your logic.
Why would I agree with your moral worldview?
But you're saying...
I'm on the other side of that.
Oh, I see. So if a right-wing Kirstarm is in power, then he's allowed to put people in prison for tweets.
I didn't say people should go to prison for tweets ever.
No, but I asked you.
I said wartime presidency.
Right.
So the riots that are being promoted on social media.
So you're saying that if an individual promotes riots on social media, they should go to jail.
No, that's what you're saying.
They should, yes.
Right.
Okay.
But only if the person in charge is right wing.
If the person in charge is left wings.
Right.
Right. So I don't think your government should arrest people for posting their opinions on social media.
Okay. If a person goes online and says everyone meet up at this place, we're going to burn it all down. Here's the address. You lock them up.
Well, I say that lock them up irrespective of who's in power and what their opinions are.
Agreed. What do we disagree on? I think what we're disagreeing on is you believe that if the situation is bad enough, a guy that you agree with politically should come in and suspend the rules by which we play the game of politics. Give me any country ever where that's not been the case.
I don't understand what your point is.
Name any point in history
when an executive and authority
facing an emergency
decided not to engage in...
Oh, I don't disagree with that.
What I'm disagreeing with you...
Do you think that your country
will be the exception
that survives the conflict?
Tim, you've got to let me finish my argument
before you disagree with it.
What I'm saying is,
you're extending the definition
of war, wartime, and emergency
in order to suit your agenda
is what it sounds like.
You are incorrect.
Okay, why am I incorrect?
Because I've already.
described fourth and fifth generational warfare academic terms that describe a state of conflict
in which a faction of people is trying to take power from that's what we disagree about right
what i see it's not an issue of disagreement i'm giving you an academic statement as to which i'm
entitled to disagree with right when i travel around whether it's europe or the u k or america i don't
see a state of conflict you just disagree with the definition yes exactly so uh let's
let's use for me it's the easiest to use the american civil war because it's what is attached to our
Do you think in 1861 in September and Atlanta, people walked outside and were fighting each other?
Look, the American Civil War is clear and our expertise for you, which it isn't for me.
I'm talking about what I see out here.
So let me try and explain to you what I'm saying.
Sure.
Who are the belligerents in the American Civil War?
Are you familiar?
Tim, did you hear what I just said?
This is why I'm asking you a question.
So what you're doing?
I'm genuinely trying to know if you know something so I can explain it to you.
And I just said it's an error of expertise for you, which it isn't for me.
So I assume most people know who the belligerents were in the American Civil War.
It was the North and the South.
Yes.
You are aware of that.
Yes.
Okay.
I was not trying to get you.
Okay.
I need to know if you know this, because if you don't, I would tell you it's the North and the South.
Okay, great.
The Confederacy and the Union.
Okay.
No one in the Confederacy walked outside and saw a conflict.
No one in the Union walked outside and saw a conflict.
The front line was Gettysburg.
Yes, but that doesn't prove that America is in a civil war.
now, there are lots of times when people walked outside and did not say we were in a civil war.
I said we are in a fourth and fifth generation of warfare.
You didn't say we're in a civil war?
I said, I don't, yes, so let's go back in time.
I said, I don't know if what happens now turns into a civil war.
Right, right, right.
I actually think it's probably less than 50%.
Yes.
I think we may be on the back end of whatever this conflict is.
Okay.
Fourth and fifth generational warfare does not mean a country is in a state of active war and wartime presidential powers.
This is why I tried saying several months ago, I don't think you understand what wartime presidential powers is a reference to.
Okay, maybe not.
It is the use of commesurate force against the force exerting power at you first.
That is, when administrative powers in New York, Wisconsin, and Georgia begin arresting Trump's lawyers, which defies the Constitution and is outside of the legal code of the United States, right?
That is dictatorial.
Trump's response cannot be, I guess I have to let him happen.
It must be, I must stop them from doing this.
It is a violation of the Constitution.
Right?
Okay.
If there are two factions and one is violating the law, we should stop them.
Agreed.
What we are dealing with over the past four years is forces align with what we would call the Democratic Party, the liberals, whatever you want to say, the bureaucratic state, the deep state, have violated the Constitution in numerous ways.
This is what I refer to as fourth and fifth and sixth generational warfare.
warfare does not be kinetic conflict.
Okay, so what do you, so, okay, now I understand the argument, perhaps we were talking
cross purposes. So what you're saying is what they've done over the last four years is unconstitutional
and wrong, and therefore it justifies what?
Trump using commiserate forces to stop unconstitutional.
What's commensurate forces?
The Insurrection Act.
I mean, and what would that, again?
Donald Trump can call upon the National Guard to go into California, Portland, and Oregon
and arrest Antifa.
The states aren't doing it.
Right.
He can have the Fed start doing it, which they've done a little bit.
If the states refuse to enforce or immigration law, for instance, and I think immigration law is another point of advanced warfare, Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to utilize the powers he has to the greatest degree to start enforcing a law that is not being done locally as he is allowed under the presidency.
If I were to say Trump should go arrest a, an attorney's, the attorney's general from three states, would that be dictatorial?
I don't know enough about it.
The attorneys general are the head of law enforcement for each state.
Yeah, I know. I know what an attorney general is, but I don't know what the context would be in the American.
Look, you're clearly much better versed.
My job is just to ask you to try and understand what you're saying.
My point is that if Donald Trump were to do so, he'd be called a dictator for arresting top political politicians in these states.
Yeah.
But in three states, the attorneys general have violated the Constitution and targeted innocent individuals in ways that is shocking to the American psyche.
However, largely on the Democrat side, they're in favor of it.
regardless. These are people who clapped and cheered when Jordan Klepper on the Daily Show showed
images of terror attacks. He literally called them acts of domestic terror and they clapped and
cheered for it. Yeah. Are we supposed to just say Trump should carry on as normal? No,
Trump's going to have to use what we would describe as wartime president. Again, let's clarify
these points. There are various forms of warfare. There's psychological warfare. Warfare can be
waged without a declaration of war. Civil warfare can happen without there being an active civil
conflict or extended conflict. You can get limited warfare. That's what Kissinger referred to.
And what we're dealing with right now is fourth and fifth and entering a new generation of warfare,
which what people would argue is sixth. Fourth generational warfare is insurgency. That's what we've
been seeing with Antifa on the far left. The purpose of fourth generational warfare is to make you
scared to live a certain way.
Vancouver canceled,
evicted Tesla from the auto show out of fear
of fire bombs and shootings.
That's the purpose of fourth-generational warfare.
Should Donald Trump simply say
we do nothing? Now, to be fair, that's Canada.
But I'm saying in the United States where Tesla chargers
and dealerships have been vandalized, shot up.
The only question for me, like, I think the only thing that
we might be disagreeing about is one thing and one thing only,
which is, let's say that Donald Trump,
and his team and his people for the next four years,
do a reverse of what the left has been doing
based on your description,
which is they violate the Constitution,
they fail to enforce it in some areas, et cetera.
Would you then be happy
for whoever is the Democrat president after that
to do the things that you are now advocating
that President Trump does?
That's the only question.
I think that is a naive question.
Because?
That doesn't entertain the realities of history
and everything that's ever happened.
I would be unhappy with literally
any amoral degenerate enforcing whatever laws that support amoral degeneracy.
It doesn't matter...
No, I'm talking about the Constitution.
So here's the issue.
If the right violated the Constitution.
This is why I explain morals versus principles first.
Yeah.
If I said we must uphold the right of parents to make medical decisions for their children,
that is a power I have granted to Donald Trump to stop the mutilation of children.
Yes.
These school districts and these doctors that are taking kids away from their parents,
because the kids think they're trans
and they're being groomed online,
we must stop this.
However, that same principle empowers Democrats
to take the children away from parents
who are protecting their kids from generation.
So that sounds like a no to me.
You wouldn't support a Democrat president
enforcing the Constitution
in the way that you want Donald Trump to do.
The reason why I answered the way I did
is not to avoid the question,
but to point out that the average person
would not understand what yes or no means
morally if I were to give a simplistic answer.
Well, look, the point you're making is the left has violated the Constitution, therefore Donald Trump needs to invoke the Exurrection Act in order to...
Let me slow down there.
My argument is an administrative war has begun as of 2015.
When they accused Donald Trump of being a Russian spy, they accused the frontrunner for the Republican Party of being a traitor to his nation for which the penalty is death, sought to impeach and imprison him and obstructed an entire presidential administration.
They arrested several people in his sphere who did nothing wrong.
They destroyed the lives of people like Carter Page and Michael Flynn who did nothing wrong.
This is, I'm sorry, but for everything they accused Trump of doing, they started.
Trump's response can't be, we don't arrest politicians.
It's not what we do in America.
No, it's they've already been doing that.
We need investigations of Adam Schiff, the J6 committee.
We need investigations of Leticia James.
We need of Wisconsin and at, and, uh, and, uh, at,
Atlanta who arrested lawyers. Both of these states arrested lawyers.
Well, if anyone's broken the law, of course, they should be investigated. But I'm asking you a very
different question. And I think it speaks to the core of our disagreement, which is, the question is,
do you want the Constitution to be enforced irrespective of who's in power? Do you not? And it's
really as simple as that, right? No. Because? This is why I started the conversation with the
discussion of morals versus principles. No, I understand that. The idea. So when I explained to you,
when I asked you what free speech meant. Yes. The Constitution
does not and never did protect free speech.
Now, the structure of the Constitution outside of the bill of rights, I largely respect,
which lays out the three branches of governments, the powers they have, and I agree with.
I don't want that to be dismantled.
However, at the advent of the Bill of Rights, you couldn't blaspheme or swear in public.
In fact, you couldn't swear in the 1970s.
Free speech was never protected.
The question you're asking me is, do I want my moral worldview of today to be protected and upheld?
And would I be upset if another person came in and tried to destroy it?
But that happens all the time no matter what. So it's not a question of if I say Donald Trump,
please protect my moral worldview, would I be upset if someone who opposed my worldview got in power?
Well, of course I would. I was upset when Joe Biden won the election and opposed my world worldview.
The question is the degrees of power, which we are using to use, to preserve our world.
The Democrats, for a long period of time, have been destroying this country. And it wasn't always the Democrats.
The Republicans were on board until Trump came in. The MAGA movement and the populist movements of the left and the right,
which have some overlap, largely diverged from what we had in our two-party system.
When the borders were opened up and you had industrialists allowing millions of non-citizens
to come into this country for the purpose of GDP growth to adhere to some ridiculous modern
monetary theory, the country was being destroyed.
We opposed this.
What did we do?
We used commensurate power as was used against us.
And what was that?
Protests, conversations, podcasts, and elections.
Then we got Donald Trump being accused of being a spy.
They tried to destroy his life.
there has been no commensurate response on the right. Donald Trump then lost an election based on
one, largely many of his own failings, and an inability to understand the laws that were being
implemented. The Democrats in several states violated the Constitution by allowing judges and
executives to overrule state legislature's elections, which violates, I believe, Article 1 of the
Constitution, which states that elections shall be determined by the legislatures, not judges or executives.
when Texas petition the Supreme Court in Texas v. Pennsylvania in 2020 to overrule these states that were in violation of the Constitution, the Supreme Court said we will not hear it. Why?
The Supreme Court is largely afraid that if becomes exposed culturally, they have no enforcement mechanism, the country falls apart.
The best thing they can do in questions of this intensity is to stay out of them, which they've continually done, proving the Supreme Court to be largely impotent.
There has still not been commensurate action from the right as to what the left has been doing.
The flooding of this country with, I'm going to give the low estimate of 10 million non-citizens,
given preferred access, given protected status, or given money in places like New York.
This erodes the foundation of what our ancestors built for us and what we intend to pass down to our children.
Gen Z can't afford houses, as you already state, the American dream is dead for them.
Yet in New York, non-citizens are given luxury hotels and PlayStation.
This is a betrayal of the American people.
All Donald Trump has done so far is what the Constitution allows.
Coming from a rather classical liberal or civil libertarian view going up the United States,
I feel that it's evolved once you start to learn from history and you look at warfare, civil wars.
What I see now is the establishment in the institutions, which have been run by what we would call the Deep State or the Uniparty or whatever for 30 years,
have violated the Constitution every which way imaginable over the past 10 years.
to which the right has not responded in any commensurate force.
I do not want a president to violate our Constitution.
I do not want anyone to do so, but it's been done.
Some have argued it's been done quite a bit by many presidents throughout history.
The issue now is that it actually threatens the fabric of, quote unquote, our democracy.
I think it's time that Donald Trump in the administration, I believe they actually are doing this,
begin to enforce the law against political forces, attorneys general, and those who violated the Constitution.
The challenge there is that this is what I refer to.
referred to as a wartime president. If Donald Trump were to arrest attorneys general who violated the
law and they have, if you were to go after the politicians, the Democrat personalities who lied
in advanced what I refer to as a criminal conspiracy or seditious conspiracy, he will be accused
by the other faction of being a dictator, which will result in an escalation of force from their
side, of which I don't view there's an off-ramp. I hope that these factions are largely, have largely
lost power and they're waning and that the arrest and prosecution of those who have committed
crimes that we can prove would would avert any kind of great crisis in the event that this
escalates into actual kinetic conflict which it kind of already is at the civil strife level i mean the
Tesla attacks the shootings etc and for a decade plus you will then see commiserate force
from the alternate factions against each other from the two factions against each other the reason
I bring up Abraham Lincoln is, when the South decided to secede illegally from the union,
Abraham Lincoln arrested the state legislature, large portions of it, from Maryland, because they were
engaged in seditious conspiracy in support of the Confederacy. There was a man who called him a
tyrant for doing so, and it was John Wilkes Booth, and thus the tyrant, six separatyrinous.
Of course, the people who oppose the actions of those who win will always accuse them of
violating the law, the Constitution, or otherwise. It is history. Ulysses S. Grant,
wrote a great letter after the Civil War, explaining all peoples have a right to defy
those who rule over them. But when you lose, you will be ruled over by your superiors.
If it comes to great conflict, which was not brought by the right, moderates, post-liberals
or otherwise, conservatives, then I hope they win. And I hope they do what must be done to win
to preserve what we view as our moral worldview. The left we would describe in this country,
is engaged in violence and doesn't share that moral worldview, and I believe they're poised
to accelerate and escalate this conflict. I just hope it doesn't actually get there.
Well, so do I, but why do you think they're poised to accelerate?
I would actually say there's no evidence to suggest they would de-escalate. There's no indicators
of de-escalation. In fact, we've only seen them cheering on for, cheering on and calling for more
violence. After the killing of Luigi Mangione, Bill Burr, the comedian, prominent liberal,
he said billionaires should be put down like dogs.
He then said Free Luigi several times,
and he continues to attack the wealthy and advocate for murder.
Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert mocked the terror attacks.
Some interpreted that as a permission or a call for more or social acceptance.
Jordan Klepper on The Daily Show played several clips of terror attacks against Tesla facilities,
which include public shootings, mass shootings,
and the audience cheered for it, to which he responded,
wow, you guys like petty acts of domestic violence. I'm sorry, of domestic terrorism.
I've founds. These people are publicly cheering for more. They're going online and saying,
do it. There's viral videos across TikTok, Instagram, and X where people say, do it, and you know what I mean.
One woman recently got a visit from the feds because she said, it will be me, I'm going to.
None of them have said what it is, but everyone knows what it is.
Well, that's why these people need to be dealt with through the criminal justice system,
and as you say, they need to be given, you know, the proper sentences for the crimes that they're committing.
The list of people you're asking to have put in prison is so large it would overwhelm our prison
system.
Well, then maybe you're going to have to build more prisons.
Or send them to El Salvador?
Well, like you said yourself, you don't want that.
Anyway, run out of time.
Great to have you on.
Good to have the conversation.
What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?
Before Tim answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our substack.
The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.
What concerns, if any, do you have of the current management of Twitter stroke X
and potential free speech risks on there?
Why has no one been able to create a viable competitor to YouTube?
What constitutes America first?
What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?
The United States has passed a series of laws that make it illegal for individuals to take work
on an individual basis.
We call these Uber laws.
started in California.
The state was concerned
about losing tax revenue
to gig services.
So they banned
individuals from working
as independent contractors
up to a certain amount
of contracts or products.
West Virginia,
this has deeply affected me,
has outright banned
independent contracting.
This means you're either
the employee of a corporation
or a corporation.
34 states in this country
have done so.
The end result of this
is that your children
will one day say,
dad, I'm broke, and the only response you will have for them is, have you considered applying at Amazon?
You won't be able to rape your neighbor's lawn. You won't be able to sell lemonade. They've made that
illegal. There are, again, 34 states that have variations of this law on the books. This is one of
the largest steps taken in. You will live in the pod and you will eat the bugs, and no one's
talking about it. That's crazy. All right. Head on over to Substack, where we'll put your questions
to Tim Paul.
Does Tim have any thoughts as to why Russia were apparently willing to pay such a relatively large amount of money via tenant media to fund his podcasts, albeit unknowingly to Tim himself?
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